MAN Nutzfahrzeuge and Rheinmetall form joint company for wheeled military vehicles

With the founding of Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles GmbH, the market for logistical and tactical military vehicles has an important new provider of complete solutions.

MAN Nutzfahrzeuge AG and Rheinmetall AG are to form a joint company for military wheeled vehicles. A contract to this end has now been signed by the two companies. The new company, which will be known as Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles GmbH (RMMV), is an important provider of complete solutions in the market for military wheeled vehicles, covering the entire range of armoured and unarmoured transport, command and role-specific vehicles for the international armed forces. Rheinmetall will have a stake of 51 percent and MAN 49 percent in the new company, which will be headquartered in Munich. The plan is still subject to approval from the competition authorities.

"With this new company we are combining the strong MAN and Rheinmetall brands and the complementary technological core competencies of the two partners to form a globally operating system provider, which will present one face to the military customer with the goal of improving its position in the world market," said Dr. Georg Pachta-Reyhofen, CEO of MAN Nutzfahrzeuge AG at the signing of the contract. RMMV unites MAN's automotive expertise in commercial vehicle manufacture with Rheinmetall's technological know-how in the military field.

"The new company follows the trend towards the joint acquisition of logistical and tactical military vehicles, whose protective and mobility characteristics have become highly similar because of current operational conditions," explained Klaus Eberhardt, Chairman of the Executive Board of Rheinmetall AG. "With their joint enterprise MAN and Rheinmetall are at the same time making an important contribution to the necessary consolidation of military vehicle systems at national and European levels," Eberhardt continued.

The first step calls for the merging of the development and sales activities of the two companies in the military wheeled vehicle sector under the aegis of the new company, which thus takes over product and market responsibility. The second contractually agreed step sees the two companies' production capacities at the plants in Kassel (Rheinmetall) and Vienna (MAN Nutzfahrzeuge) integrated into the joint company by the end of 2011.

In the initial phase, RMMV will have around 370 employees; when the second step has been completed this will increase to around 1,300 employees, whose annual turnover will amount to more than a billion euros.